First Look - City of Steam, the upcoming Arabic MMORPG

Technology and Magic meet in the Steampunk world of Nexus

By Serge Farah

There’s really no shortage of free-to-play MMO games scattered around the Internet, but with such a huge selection comes a massive disparity in content. You have games that lack interesting gameplay or intelligent design or pay-to-win games that hide all the interesting things behind a paywall.

City of Steam is game that wants to avoid all that. It’s a game that presents high quality gameplay to the player in a dense, varied world; a game that seeks to build a mutual relationship with its players. Furthermore, its a western MMORPG that will feature full Arabic support, a task which was undertaken by Dubai-based publisher DAO games.

What is City of Steam

City of Steam is an F2P MMORPG game created by China-based studio The Mechanist by a multinational team featuring people from US, New Zealand, Canada, and China, among others. The game is completely browser based, requiring no installation or PC client to run. Now browser based games don’t exactly have the best reputation among gamers, being associated with Farmville and its ilk. But before you judge, City of Steam looks and plays like a full fledged RPG, with beautifully designed environment and complex game options.

The World of Nexus

We at IGN ME love fantasy as much as the next Tolkien obsessed gamer, but after nth medieval fantasy based MMO, we find ourselves yearning for something different. City of Steam, as the name suggests is a steampunk-based game, an aesthetic we don’t see in video games as much as we’d like to.

City of Steam takes place in Nexus, a steampunk world that is equal parts technology and magic (or as the devs call it, Industrial Age Fantasy). Although the game has been in development for the past three years, the game’s story was actually written in 2003 by the game’s lead designer Dave Lindsey to use for the City of Steam Tabletop RPG that he created. Ten years later, that story now serves as the basis for the City of the Steam MMORPG.

Localisation

CoS’s main draw in the region is that it is being fully localized into Arabic by the Dubai based publishers DAO Games. We spoke to the COO about the localization and he assured us that the Arabization process won’t be a simple a translation. DAO is rewriting the game’s content; the Arabic version will still tell the same story with the same plot, but the names of characters, races, classes and locales will be given new Arabic names, and the dialogue will be restructured in Arabic, all to give the Arabic version a more “organic” feel.

Furthermore, the game will feature localized events, such as specialized events for Ramadan, Eid and the like, which will differ from the events available in the Western version.

For more information, read our interview with the game's Arabic publisher here, or vist the Game's website here.